In nuce: Assimilate and Notch have announced that they are further strengthening their professional partnership. This is according to a recent press release. The aim of the partnership is to offer users even better solutions for virtual production workflows – whether based on green screens or with the support of LED walls. Assimilate is a developer of on-set and post-production solutions in the software segment. Notch is described as a tool that simplifies the creation of moving images in live situations.
In toto: Assimilate’s product portfolio now also supports notch block 3D environments. The Assimilate products affected by the support are: Live FX Studio (Virtual Production Compositor), Live FX and Scratch (both finishing suites). In addition, NotchLC, the GPU-accelerated video codec from Notch, is now natively supported – for both encoding and decoding (Digital Production reported on 24/08/2022). Version 9.5 of NotchLC was recently released. According to the same press release, the support of NotchLC offers for the first time: colour and metadata-accurate quality control, mastering and transcoding. According to the developer information, both software solutions (Notch Builder and Assimilate Live FX Studio) are artist-orientated – instead of being geared towards the needs of programmers. This should make it easy for artists to use. By the way: Users can also use Scratch to perform quality control.
What does Notch Builder do for users? The press release goes on to say that Notch Builder allows artists to quickly create elaborate 3D environments – and then export this 3D scene as a notch block or upload it to Assimilate Live FX. Assmilate Live FX then allows live compositing to be carried out in the green screen or environments to be thrown onto LED flips. Notch Blocks will now enable artists to create Previz and Final Pixe composites – in real time. According to the developer, users will be able to control lighting, virtual TV inputs, the position of objects or the orientation of virtual cameras. The press release includes an enthusiastic statement from Assimilate CEO Jeff Edson, who predicts increased creativity and productivity for artists thanks to the partnership. Notch co-founder Luke Malcolm describes the partnership as an important step towards further advancing professional work on the virtual film set.
NotchLC in practice: The press release describes a real-life application example in which Leo Lovera, owner of the finishing studio Moving Forward Studios, describes his experience with LotchLC. Leo says: “On a recent project, we had to deliver five different 15-minute clips in different resolutions from 1.2K to 4K. These clips needed to be uploaded to a media server. Thanks to the native NotchLC encoder in Assimilate Scratch, me and my team were able to render these clips three to five times in real time.” Leo also explains that the project was a synchronised multiscreen event, which makes the use case even more impressive.
Clicked further: Try Assimilate together with Notch – via register.assimilateinc.com. In the video below, Mazze Aderhold (from Assimilate) and Thomas Peters (from Brompton Technology) demonstrate how a setup with 3D Notch Block and an LED wall can look. For the professional handling of notch blocks in the context of virtual production, post-production and quality control, Assimilate has provided a four-part video tutorial consisting of the parts Live FX Studio: Virtual Production with Notch Blocks, Scratch & Notch Blocks, Scratch & Notch Block QC and Playout and Scratch & NotchLC Mastering and Transcoding. Interested parties can also find these linked below.
Frame Remapping technology with Brompton and Live FX
Live FX Studio: Virtual Production with Notch Blocks
